Hacking Democracy
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Hacking Democracy |
| Original title | Hacking Democracy |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2006 |
| length | 82 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK Not tested |
| Rod | |
| Director | Simon Ardizzone , Russell Michaels |
| production | Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels, Robert Carrillo Cohen |
| occupation | |
Hacking Democracy is a documentary by Russell Michaels, Simon Ardizzone, Robert Carrillo Cohen, and producer Sarah Teale of Teale-Edwards Productions, which was broadcast in America on premium broadcaster HBO . Production lasted three years, during which many security flaws and bugs in American voting machines were revealed.
The film was nominated for an Emmy .
Errors shown
The documentary accompanies Bev Harris , head of the non-profit election surveillance group Black Box Voting, and her deputy Kathleen Wynne , in their attempt to find out whether the voting machines from Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions ) are safe or not.
Andy Stephenson, an employee at Black Box Votings, helped with documents and recorded the conversation between Bev Harris and a voting machine tester with a hidden camera. Bev Harris and members of Black Box Voting next went to Florida, where Al Gore received "over 16,000 official" negative votes "in the 2000 presidential election. Bev Harris wanted to compare the election results sent to her with the certified originals. The election commissioner for Volusia County , Deania Lowe assured that the electoral process had gone extremely well. The certified originals are in the electoral inspector's warehouse. Bev Harris went to the warehouse immediately after her office visit and Kathleen Wynne was filming electoral officers, apparently surprised by the visit, and others. a. Put original election documents and certified results in garbage bags in front of the warehouse ready for collection (American law prohibits the removal of official results within 22 months after the election).
From 2005 to 2006, Bev Harris tested in collaboration with Dr. Herbert Thompson and Harri Hursti five times the security of voting machines. As a result, significant deficiencies were found.
First it was tested whether the election results on the memory card can be changed. The team found out that the results were unencrypted and not password-protected in a Microsoft Access database on the memory card. Diebold Election Systems made improvements by making it impossible to access the databases. Then Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson a Microsoft Visual Basic program that searches the database for a series of letters or numbers ( string ) and replaces them with another. However, this type of hack could have been easily spotted by an election observer because the printout of the election results would have been different from the results on the card.
The next step was to check whether the results could be manipulated by changing the memory cards. According to American law, it is forbidden to have executable code (i.e. programs , but also scripts, etc.) on the memory cards of voting machines. Nevertheless, Black Box Voting found such a code on the cards. When asked by Bev Harris, the Diebold spokesman denied that this code existed, but it was there. The Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti changed the election result by giving one candidate negative votes and the other positive votes from the start. As a result, the balance was zero again, and the voting machines were not aware of the attempted fraud. They demonstrated this technique with a small selection that was specially designed for this purpose. An official election observer later said he recognized this result as legitimate as there was no sign of attempted fraud.
Reactions
Even if nobody at Diebold Election Systems had ever seen the film, they immediately denied that the voting machines were unsafe and demanded that the film not be shown. However, HBO refused to remove the film from the program. Diebold wrote in a letter to HBO: Harri Hursti is shown attacking a Diebold machine in Florida. But his attack proved later to be a complete sham.
The State Secretary of Florida commissioned a study to determine whether the voting machines are safe. The report said on page 2:
“Harri Hursti's attack does work: Mr. Hursti's attack on the AV-OS is definitely real. He was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card. He needed no passwords, no cryptographic keys, and no access to any other part of the voting system, including the GEMS election management server. "
The DVD
The film was also released on DVD in America. In addition to the normal film, it also contained deleted scenes, a trailer and a biography of the producers.
swell
- ↑ This article in the first version was for the most part a translation of the article from the English language Wikipedia. A list of the authors is available here .
- ↑ The 28th Annual Emmy Awards for News & Documentary: The Nominations. ( Memento of the original from February 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. EmmyOnline.org.
- ↑ Report prepared on behalf of the State of Florida ( memento of the original from March 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
